The head-fake recovery that bull-shills were counting on to part more investors from their money is petering out in plain sight.
Helicopter Ben is about to drop hints on how he will execute Quantitative Easing Phase 2. This keeps media chatterboxes busy parsing his every turn of phrase for hints on how investors should bet. I am glad that at least Ben isn't as difficult to decipher as his predecessor.
The shelf life on economic statistics like GDP growth keeps getting shorter. Revisions to second quarter growth ought to put the U.S. economy back on the down slope toward economic annihilation.
This gloomy horizon means the recent boom in M&A action will be short-lived. That's too bad, because I've been looking at a lot of recent merger activity that might have made good arbitrage plays.
Something else will crash besides the market: municipal services. Rolling shutdowns of fire stations are just the beginning of curtailments to local government services, although I suspect much of it will be a negotiating ploy by public employee unions unwilling to face cuts in benefits. The rallying cry of "Protect our huge pensions or we cut more shifts!" will soon be heard in union halls and government cafeterias across this great land of ours. The silver lining to that nonsense is that muni bond payments might be the last things to be cut, if ever. Maybe munis will come out looking good after all.
